Lorne Gunter: Determined foreign madmen not easy to topple

Watching a regime like Egypt’s crumble under the weight of largely peaceful protests, it’s tempting to believe that all that is needed to bring down an authoritarian regime is a mass outpouring of popular will for democracy.

Think again. Peaceful change is, instead, a two-way street.

Just as important as the citizenry’s desire for reform would seem to be a willingness to leave on the part of the targeted regime or dictator. Just look at what is happening in Syria and Libya. Authoritarian rulers who are determined to stay and are willing to brutalize their people to retain power are very hard to dislodge. Short of intervention by modern, Western military forces on the ground, little can change regimes that don’t want to be changed.

Monday, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad sent tanks and thousands of troops against Syrian cities known to harbour pro-democracy rebels in what some witnesses labelled a “savage war” against reformers. Particularly hard hit was the southern city of Deraa where government forces are said to have gone door-to-door with guns and knives looking for pro-democracy sympathizers to arrest or kill them.

Similarly in Libya, forces loyal to strongman Muammar Gaddafi are said to be hammering, Misrata, the last major city remaining in rebel hands. Despite NATO’s no-fly zone – now more than a month old – pro-Gaddafi forces have moved up artillery and Grad rockets to the city limits from where they can pound civilian neighbourhoods. In response to this latest violence by Gaddafi against his own people, NATO bombed the strongman’s home compound in Tripoli early Monday, destroying a office building and a reception hall.

But despite the latest aerial attack on Gaddafi’s vast residence and the addition last week of American Predator drones to NATO’s squadron, there is no sign of Col. Gaddafi going away soon. He seems unworried about his own personal safety, probably because he is confident NATO cannot know precisely where his at any moment so cannot be reliably target him directly. And he has no qualms about inflicting hurt on his own people, so can be equally confident they won’t rise up against him en masse. Finally, so long as he maintains his grasp on the power of the purse and of patronage – meaning so long as he can keep rewarding those who remain loyal to him – he can sustain the terror apparatus – military and police – needed to keep himself in power.

What should be increasingly obvious from the Syrian and Libyan uprisings is that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was less of a brute than either Pres. Assad or Col. Gaddafi. Certainly, forced loyal to Pres. Mubarak killed as many as 900 protestors in the early days of the uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, when the president was eager to staunch protests before they got out of hand. Still, when it became clear to him that to stay would require him to escalate the violence against his own people to an even higher level, he didn’t have the stomach for it and left. Or he didn’t have the support he needed from the army. Or both.

Pres. Mubarak lacked the heart or the energy or the henchmen, or a bit of all three, to maintain his iron grip over the Egyptian government and people. But the same does not seem to be happening in Libya and Syria where younger or more ruthless dictators are more eager to retain power and more willing to shed their own people’s blood.

Col. Gaddafi may crack. After all, he is under more direct pressure from Western forces. And he is older and has been in power for over 40 years. Like Pres. Mubarak he may be running low of the vitality needed to preside over a murderous state. But unlike Mr. Mubarak, the colonel seems to be certifiable. And insanity goes a long way.

Syria, on the other hand, has no Western pressure to speak of – either media or military – and has plenty of backing from another brutal regime, Iran. So don’t be surprised if Pres. Assad holds out indefinitely.

Rather than to Egypt’s revolution, the parallel in Libya may be to Kosovo in 1999 and in Syria to China in1989.

In Kosovo, as in Libya, NATO mounted an air war against a regime it wanted gone, namely that of Serbia strongman Slobodan Milosevic. For nearly 70 days, NATO bombed largely non-military targets in hopes of pressuring Milosevic to withdraw Serbian forces from the province of Kosovo. But once Pres. Milosevic recognized that NATO wasn’t willing to cause real damage, he simply resolved to wait them out. Only after NATO planes started hitting strategic targets, such as power plants, rail lines and Mr. Milosevic’s palace, and only after NATO inserted ground troops, did the Serbians take the West seriously and withdraw.

And, of course, during the democracy protests in Beijing in the spring of 1989, the West watched – as it is watching now in Syria – but was unwilling to do anything other than complain, neither bomb nor invade.

It’s not difficult for a large, modern, Western army to displace a Third World dictator. Think Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who was more entrenched and at least as well armed as Assad and Gaddafi. In 2003, of course, it took just 21 days to topple his regime, with very little Western loss of life.

But absent willingness to risk ground troops, there is little Western nations can do to push out a distant dictator who doesn’t want to go.